Long Beach council swaps gunshot-detection system for police overtime

LONG BEACH - The city has shelved plans for a gunshot-detection system to make more money available for police overtime.

Council members voted 7-0 late Tuesday to shift $350,000 in oil surplus money that had been committed in last year's budget for the "shot-spotting" technology and instead use it to place more officers in the field as the need arises.

The budget for the fiscal year starting Oct. 1 initially allotted $7 million for police overtime, though $9 million to $10 million has been expended in recent years.

The difference spurred enough council concerns for the body to authorize an additional $2.6 million to be used for extra hours for officers.

The sponsor of the legislation, Councilman Patrick O'Donnell, claimed police overtime could still be "radically underbudget."

"We may have to address that midyear," O'Donnell said.

After research, Long Beach Police Chief Jim McDonnell said the amount of money set aside for gunshot locating was enough to only cover a small area of the city, perhaps the size of a council district.

Better results could be derived from using the funds to put more police on the street, according to McDonnell, who estimated the dollars could add 6,000 personnel hours to the police budget.

"This would give us the ability to deploy people at times and locations where we can anticipate there will be problems," McDonnell said.

During budget discussions, LBPD Administrative Budget Chief Braden Phillips projected that $10.3 million would have been spent on police overtime by Sept. 30, the end of the last fiscal year.